The skinflint story

skinflint is Europe’s leading vintage lighting retailer, supplying restored original vintage lights to shops, hotels, bars and restaurants around the world, from Patagonia, Aesop, Padella and Somerset House, to private residences designed by Plain English. We even offer a lighting hire division for film and tv, which is why skinflint lights can be spotted in titles like Mission Impossible.

We’ve grown a lot over the last few years, but in 2009, skinflint was the brainchild of two lighting enthusiasts - Sophie, a BAFTA award-winning Art Director, and Chris, who spent his early career working with the industry’s brave and bold at Foster + Partners, iGuzzini and Philippe Starck.

This high level exposure led to Chris questioning the status quo; why couldn’t modern-day homes, hotels, shops and restaurants be fitted with salvaged and restored vintage lights? Chris put his theory to the test in a Victorian home in North London, and with that, skinflint was born.

These days, we’re far bigger than a team of two. We’re led by Chris from a Victorian studio in Cornwall where we supply lights on projects globally, from the UK and the US to Hong Kong and Australia. But whilst we’ve grown, we’ve also stayed true to our founding ethos; we continue to stop lighting going to landfill through product circularity initiatives like our Full Circle buy-back scheme. We’re a Certified B Corp, so we use business as a force for good and hold ourselves accountable to being the change we want to see in the world by donating to charities like 1% for the Planet every year.

And when we’re not at our desks or in our workshop, we’re probably out rescuing vintage lights from abandoned WWII munitions factories, famed Bohemian lighting towns, and shipbreakers’ yards in Gujarat.